Colour changes like Coyo's don't bother me too much. The human eye and brain have evolved for several million years to see colour and I do not mind people using to highlight their questions or direct my attentions.

maleteen2000's use of colour strikes me as useless.

Added to this, there is a growing tendancy to change fonts or font sizes. I am not very fond of this because it always seems to translate into either a font my old eyes cannot see clearly or I have somebody shouting at me. I find both kind of rude.

As with most things, I suggest we first try behaviourial fixes. If we explain kindly that these things are not welcome here, people may stop using them. If, however, the privileges keep getting abused, then St. vroom or the bishops will need to lay down the law.

Mik mikfire

I agree with that last part. While I use alot of HTML in my posts, I try to keep away from coloring anything. There are a number of ways to drive attention by with italics, bold or underline (although I always associate underlined text with links right off the bat).

I see no need for coloring text. Truth be told, the usage of coloring will only screw it up for fellow monks that are using dark themes and/or pagers. I think my sig is a perfectly good example of good font usage (although it used to be a bit too big, and I inserted a size="-1" after a while).

#!/home/bbq/bin/perl
# Trust no1!

I was originally going to say that color can be useful and should be allowed without restriction, but... after reading Corion's post I have to agree that while I (and many others) use the default theme, there's a pantload of people who use alternate themes. (Hey Vroom, are there any statistics?) I like the example tags and would use them if they existed. We'd just need to come up with colors in good taste for each theme.

Your Humble Servant,
-Chuck

Certain Font usage

Do I want to babysit you and hold your hand?
Not really. Do I want to take away all your options for expression away?
Not really.
Do I want to strip out HTML tags that might break old writeups?
Not really.
Should I write up suggested guidelines and enforce them in the future?
Probably....
Is it something I want to do today?
Not really...

While color in moderation doesn't necessarily annoy me personally I would avoid it because of the fact that someone may be using a different theme than you and this may not show up well on the new disco perl monks theme of tomorrow.

So my thoughts... while color isn't bad in moderation entire posts in it should be avoided especially if you decide not to close your <font> tags. Should you use a little bit of color.... maybe, maybe not since others using different themes from your own may not be able to easily read it. Should I see three lines with <H1> tags in a reply to someones post or anything other than a user-submitted tutorial? NO!!! Knock yourself out with Bolds and Italics but don't abuse it!!

vroom | Tim Vroom | vroom@cs.hope.edu

As for the color thing, I pretty much agree with everyone else...it can be used effectively, but should not be necessary, and can certainly be ugly and tacky. I'm all for allowing such people to point themselves out though :)

As for the javascript, I think maleteen made his point simply because it is annoying. An effective demo on why javascript should not be allowed in posts.

The annoying doesn't bother me (see above). Javascript is a vast sucking security hole on many platforms, and certainly to the website (I'm guessing it is not impossible to write Javascript in a post here that can do otherthings on the site with your login. How would you like to have 50 msgs saying "Larry Wall is a Camel loving dingbat" posted in your name, for example. Javascript should be disabled in posts for THIS reason.